Issue

February 2015

From this Issue

Denny ParkSouth Lake Union, 100 Dexter Avenue NA tiny (.1-acre) graveled area inside the city’s oldest park, surrounded by beautiful towering trees, rhododendrons and azaleas. A nice touch: a fire hydrant situated inside the dog area, for dogs with a sense of humor. Better than being on a leash, but its small size would not be satisfying for active dogs.

Walk around the city and you might see a cat atop a busker’s piano, a parrot fake-flying on a bicycle’s handlebars or a hefty pig on a leash making the sidewalk look awfully small. We cherish our pets in a big way here, and much is made of the fact that dogs and cats outnumber children under 18, leading to the reasonable deduction: Dogs and cats and their ilk are our kids.

About 20 feet off Ballard’s busy 15th Avenue, and a few blocks west along the stretch of 70th Street that houses Delancey pizzeria, The Fat Hen and other hits, sits Brunswick & Hunt (1480 NW 70th St.; 206.946.1574; brunswickandhunt.com

Whether you consider them free art exhibits, neighborhood signifiers, welcome distractions while stuck in traffic or lone bursts of color on gloomy winter days, murals provide a vital backdrop to city life.

The Harvard Exit, which screened its final film in mid-January, didn’t start out as an art house movie theater. The Woman’s Century Club (WCC), a group of progressive Seattle women founded in 1891, had the building constructed as a clubhouse for its burgeoning membership (which included Seattle Mayor Bertha Landes).

Tomorrow, 50 Shades of Grey (the blockbuster novel set in Seattle) opens as a movie--perfectly timed for our most punishing season. Here are some tips for finding pleasure in the pain that is February.

If you’re lucky enough to be jetting off to a tropical isle this month, whip your wardrobe into shape with something from Pua, a line of beach-worthy dresses, skirts and tops by Ballard’s Shala Sullivan Daniel, owner of former Queen Anne boutique La Femme.

BALLARD

For the past decade, scenic designer Jennifer Zeyl has been causing audiences to gasp upon seeing sets she has created for plays at the Seattle Repertory Theatre, Intiman Theatre, On the Boards, ACT and many other local venues.

If you were a kid in the early 1970s, you likely spent Saturday mornings sprawled on the living room floor in front of cartoons—and just as likely, you were unaware of the radical act taking place on the tube.

“The first thing that got kicked off the budget was the flying rig,” says filmmaker Webster Crowell. A contraption that facilitates the illusion that actors are flying would have come in handy on Rocketmen, his retro sci-fi adventure story, but this is a low-budget, seven-episode Web series.

They’ve been wooing us for years with their flirty pastel colors, their delicate crackle, tender chew and cream filling. French macarons first caught our eye at Bakery Nouveau, then at Belle Epicurean and Crumble & Flake. Now, at Kirkland’s ladylike Lady Yum, the meringue-based cookies have a fitting showcase: a chandeliered shop dedicated to the perfect macaron.

In Seattle, we start early, serving toddlers long noodles from shared bowls of steaming pho, ordering salty edamame for the kids, who eat it like it’s popcorn. We learn there’s hardly a better way to connect with friends than to meet on weekend mornings, pacing to keep warm on the chilly sidewalks outside Harbor City or Jade Garden, before we feast on dim sum.

When it opened in September, expectations for Trove couldn’t have been higher. The place—a 4,000-square-foot, four-concepts-under-one-roof, renovated auto-shop space on Capitol Hill housing a Korean barbecue, a cocktail bar, a noodle bar and a parfait walk-up window—had been the talk of the town for months.

Seattle is booming. Newcomers are swarming to town. A largely male workforce is spending big, driving up rents and real estate prices, but no one wants to complain as the good times roll; after all, the boom is following a bust that temporarily slowed Seattle’s growth plans.

Last year, the U.S. Department of Justice released a landmark study on the American sex industry. Commissioned by the DOJ, it set out to collect nationwide data on the underground sector for the first time, focusing on eight major American cities, including Denver, San Diego, Dallas and Seattle. Researchers spoke with hundreds of sex workers, pimps, local police, federal agents and others.

Cannabis sativa is having a moment—from selling out in our first recreational marijuana stores to adding heft as hemp to vegetarian dishes around town. And while everyone is talking about the former, we’re here to celebrate the latter.

South Seattle–based jewelry designer Jamie Joseph (jamiejoseph.com) is best known for her highly coveted, faceted gemstone rings, each designed with a distinctive thick bezel and sometimes, a tiny diamond “beauty mark” embedded in the stone.

In the fall of 2013, researchers at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center gathered at the bedside of a lymphoma patient about to undergo a new cancer treatment—the very first human in the treatment’s first human trial.

“Rocks! Rocks!” declares the December 1906 issue of Up-To-The-Times, Walla Walla’s magazine of record until 1930. “The best and largest strawberries grow in among these rocks, and such berries, too, as can’t be raised in the East. The fruit trees are growing here in abundance. The luscious clusters of grapes are still on the vine, unhurt, as yet, by frost, and this is October.”